Jeremy Jones
- Victims
- 21 attributed - 1 CONVICTION, for the rape and murder of Lisa Marie Nichols in Alabama; 2 further killings he was charged with and never tried for; and about 20 he confessed to across four states and then RECANTED, having never been charged with any of them. The credibility of those confessions is disputed and at least one has been examined and set aside by the investigating agency
- Years active
- 1992 - 2004
- Location
- Kansas/Alabama/Georgia/Louisiana, USA
- Method
- Shooting / Stabbing with knife
- Status
- Arrested on September 21, 2004 under the alias John Paul Chapman, his real name established from fingerprints. Convicted of the capital murder of Lisa Marie Nichols and sentenced to death in Alabama in late 2005 on a jury vote of ten to two. He was at that time also charged in the deaths of Amanda Greenwell, sixteen, in Douglasville, Georgia and Katherine Collins, forty-five, of New Orleans; neither charge produced a trial. He confessed to detectives to at least a dozen and eventually about twenty further killings in Kansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma, maintained his innocence publicly while doing so, and later recanted; he has never been charged with any of them. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation examined his confession to the 1992 murder of Jennifer Judd and his claimed involvement in the 1999 Freeman killings in Oklahoma, and no charge followed. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence in August 2007, rejecting arguments that his trial should have been moved for pre-trial publicity and that his confession was coerced, and the Alabama Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal. Held on death row at Holman Correctional Facility, Atmore, with no execution date set.
Jeremy Brian Jones was born in 1973 and grew up in Miami, Oklahoma. He was a methamphetamine user with a long record for drugs, domestic violence and indecent exposure, and a reputation locally as a man who befriended people in order to steal from their houses.
In 1992 he was living in Baxter Springs, Kansas, next door to Justin and Jennifer Judd, a young couple who had repeatedly called the police about him. Ten days after their wedding Jennifer Judd was found stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. Jones was not named a suspect and was gone.
He solved his warrant problem by taking a name. A woman whose son was serving a long sentence, sympathetic to his complaints about the police, gave him her son's birth certificate and social security card, and for the next decade he lived and worked as John Paul Chapman. He moved south for construction work after Hurricane Ivan.
In September 2004 he raped and murdered Lisa Nichols, a forty-five-year-old woman in Turnerville, Alabama, shooting her and setting her body alight in her bath. He was arrested and his fingerprints returned his real name.
He then confessed, over months, to as many as twenty-one killings across Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia and Florida, including Jennifer Judd, the teenager Amanda Greenwell, Katherine Collins, and Patrice Endres, a hairdresser who had vanished from her salon in Georgia. He gave detail on some and nothing usable on others, and he later retracted almost all of it, saying he had been high and had wanted the attention. Investigators regard a small number as probable and the rest as unresolved.
He was convicted of Lisa Nichols's murder in 2005 and sentenced to death. He is at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama.